Biofuel startup launches chemical side business

President Chris Beatty, third from right, and staff from Trillium FiberFuels have launched Cascade Analytical Reagents and Biochemicals, a web-based business supplying the ethanol industry. (Photo courtesy of Trillium Fiberfuels)

Research into sugar-based biofuels requires sugar not sold at a grocery store.

Corvallis start-up Trillium FiberFuels for the last five years has been developing cellulosic ethanol technology that uses xylose, a sugar contained in biomass. Trillium could purchase the thousands of liters of xylose it needs from a chemical company, but doing so would cost tens of thousands of dollars. So Chris Beatty, Trillium’s president, founded his own company to provide xylose and a dozen other carbohydrates at affordable prices.

Cascade Analytical Reagents and Biochemicals is a web-based business intended to serve researchers working on advanced development of biofuels and other products. To keep prices down, Beatty worked with suppliers to independently analyze and certify their chemical products for quality. By buying in bulk directly from a supplier, Beatty was able to reduce costs by 25 to 50 percent, depending on the product.

“The niche we see is people like us in the first stages of scale-up,” Beatty said. “We’ve already sold a few thousand orders just by word of mouth. Sugars are the basis for all living things, which makes them popular for all research. We saw an immediate opportunity to help people like ourselves, and to allow some growth.”

Unlike other plant-derived sugars, such as glucose, there are no inexpensive sources of xylose, according to John Holladay, energy and environment directorate with the Pacific Northwest National Lab. While glucose is easy to break down from plant starches, xylose maintains plant structure and is not designed to break down.

“You need to separate the xylose from other components,” Holladay said. “And that’s an expensive thing to do.”

CARB’s prices are competitive, but its product selection is limited; only 12 are for sale on the company’s website. But as orders come in, Beatty is hoping his team can start to certify more, or even make some of its own products in the lab. The tricky part, he said, is identifying which chemicals have commercial pull.

Carrie Atiyeh, spokeswoman for Zeachem, a cellulosic ethanol company building a demonstration facility near Boardman, said CARB’s service is needed.

“This is a great step forward for our industry and for Trillium,” she said. “We need all sorts of solutions to make things easier and more cost effective.”

And the cellulosic ethanol industry needs all the help it can get, Holladay said. Despite gains in research, ethanol made from grain and corn is still more cost competitive with petroleum-based fuels. An infrastructure issue also could limit the value of cellulosic ethanol.

“We have a trillion-dollar infrastructure in place to make our liquid fuel and get it to people,” Holladay said. “Ethanol doesn’t fit into that as readily as it might. It can’t go into a pipeline. You need to change engines and fuel distribution systems. When you’re talking about the real cost of a biofuel, you have to think about that.”

Nevertheless, sugars will continue to play a role in advanced fuel development – ethanol or otherwise, Holladay said. And Beatty hopes researchers will keep his newest start-up in mind. CARB products are available at www.cascadebiochems.com.

“It’s an experiment,” Beatty said. “When it’s four times more expensive to order elsewhere, that adds up.”